This year, to mark National Hate Crime Awareness Week, Transport for London is funding hundreds of free Active Bystander Awareness sessions* over the autumn and winter, as part of its efforts to empower Londoners to safely take action when they encounter hate crime on the transport network.
Throughout National Hate Crime Awareness Week (12-19 October), TfL is working with the police to run a series of events across the transport network to raise awareness of hate crime and the work TfL is doing to tackle it, to help reassure those who may lack confidence to travel on public transport and empower Londoners to support their fellow passengers.
Many Londoners remain worried about hate crime, including people from Jewish and Muslim communities who have seen a significant rise in incidents in the past year. TfL is committed to tackling hate, intolerance and extremism and continues to take a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of abuse on its network. Thousands of frontline staff are trained to support customers, with more than 500 TfL enforcement officers and around 2,000 police and police community support officers patrolling the network.
To help support Londoners to speak up and support one another to prevent abuse or harassment, TfL is hosting free online Active Bystander Awareness training this autumn and winter. The interactive three-hour course is led by the identity-based violence prevention charity Protection Approaches, and was developed in partnership with the Britain’s East and Southeast Asian Network.
These sessions aim to empower people to take action to prevent or reduce harm when they encounter hate crime by looking at how to respond to a series of hypothetical scenarios. With the course partly funded by the Mayor’s Shared Endeavour Fund, TfL has added to this funding to expand the training to even more Londoners. The sessions will be held from late October to early December, are aimed at all Londoners and require no previous knowledge.
More than 200 Londoners benefitted from the free training last year with participants consistently providing positive feedback and reporting increased confidence in dealing with hate crime incidents. At the start of the sessions, 28 per cent participants knew what to do if a hate incident occurred to someone else, rising to 87 per cent after the training.
Deputy Mayor for Transport, Seb Dance, said: “Ensuring Londoners’ safety is the Mayor’s number one priority, and tackling hate crime is a key component of our work to ensure that people can travel around our city with confidence. It’s brilliant to see these important training sessions being offered to even more Londoners, as part of our efforts to build a safer, fairer and greener London.”
